Andrew Lloyd Webber recalls past disasters and looks forward to new show about Stephen Ward and the Profumo affair

BARBADOS—If you had an hour to sit down privately with Andrew Lloyd Webber, would you ask him all about the high points of his career?

Don’t. The disasters are much more fun.

Well, maybe not fun at the time, but with a few decades of hindsight he actually seems to enjoy recalling them now.

“The very worst night in my life? Oh that’s easy,” the 64 year-old Baron Lloyd-Webber says, sipping a glass of white wine at his home in Barbados, one of several around the world.

We’re here because ofOver the Rainbow, the CBC-TV reality show that will cast the lead role of Dorothy in the Mirvish version of Lloyd Webber’s hit production of The Wizard of Oz, which starts in December. It is the eighth such TV program he’s done in recent years. He says they’re “all different, yet somehow the same.”

The night before the interview, he had to trim the 20 potential Dorothys down to 10 and he didn’t enjoy the task. “They’re all so young, so talented and still so very impressionable. One knows that no matter how nicely one lets them go, they’re going to be very hurt.”

But not quite as hurt as Lloyd Webber was on the evening he’s about to recall.

“I think back to the night that Jesus Christ Superstar opened on Broadway in 1971. Every single dream I had died as I watched this absolutely, completely, totally alien-to-everything-I-wanted spectacle unfold in front of me,” he says.

He is referring to Tom O’Horgan’s over-the-top version of the musical, based very loosely on the last week of the life of Jesus, which came complete with campy Pharisees, dinosaur bones on the set and a very young Ben Vereen maxing out the hysteria as Judas Iscariot.

“It was so vulgar and wrong,” he shudders. “Nobody connected with it could seem to grasp what the show was about. Judas tells us. ‘We’re in an occupied country and this Jesus is going too far and we’re all going to get crushed. . . . ’

“I believe you could be looking at Syria right now with the show. That’s the brilliance of Tim (Rice)’s lyrics.”

The first stage production was important to Lloyd Webber, because even though the album had scored a huge success in America it hadn’t made that strong an impression in his native England.

“The initial reaction back home was rather disappointing. We got caught in the crossfire. The young people who liked the music thought the subject matter was boring and the older people just found it all blasphemous and incomprehensible.”

And now, it was being mangled in a production that four of six New York critics slammed, including the all-powerful New York Times, whose Clive Barnes ended his review with “Superstar seemed to me less than super.”

Lloyd Webber narrowly missed out on working with his idol at that time: U.S. theatrical producer and director Hal Prince, who was looking to secure the rights to the show.

Lloyd Webber sighs. “I kept thinking about that telegram I never got.

“Hal Prince had wired me telling me how much he loved the album and offering to produce and direct it, but I never got it. I wonder what would have happened if I had,” he says.

“He kept in touch with me and told me after Jeeves (a major Lloyd Webber flop in 1975) that even though it didn’t work I shouldn’t be discouraged. I told him I was writing a show about Eva Peron and he said, ‘That sounds fascinating. When you’re finished, send it to me.’ And I did.”

Evita, with lyrics by Tim Rice, became one of Lloyd Webber’s biggest hits and is currently enjoying a sold-out Broadway revival. It was afterward that he ended his partnership with Rice, embarking on a production that seemed destined for disaster.

“It was a show based on a dead American poet, being told through dance. It was directed by the head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, going into a theatre nobody had ever had a hit in and produced by an unknown named Cameron Mackintosh.

“I was also writing without Tim Rice for the first time and our one bankable star, Judi Dench, tore her Achilles tendon and had to drop out during rehearsals,” he says.

“We did out first preview before the entire theatre community who had come to say, ‘We are about to witness the biggest catastrophe of all time.’”

But they didn’t. And Cats is still playing to this day, fulfilling its advertising slogan “Now and Forever” with a vengeance.

“Why was Cats such a success? Because of all of us. If you’re working in musical theatre, you must realize just how much part of a team you are and it all depends on the luck of the team,” Lloyd Webber says.

The importance of teamwork was shown to him “in spades” when it came to the 2010 London production of his most recent show, Love Never Dies, the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera.

“It simply did not work. It shows you how the wrong design, the wrong director, all those things can change the fate of a show.

“I’m so happy that the Australian production of it is something that I’m pretty proud of. Its director, Simon Phillips, is a major force to be reckoned with.”

Lloyd Webber admits there were other factors that coloured his feelings about Love Never Dies, namely being diagnosed with prostate cancer and operated on during the lead-up to the show.

“What did I think when I was diagnosed? To be honest, I thought, ‘Let’s just get this done and get on with it.’ I didn’t say, ‘Oh no, I’ve still got 84 musicals to write,’ I thought, ‘This is a bore.’

“Well, I didn’t realize it was all a much bigger deal than they tell you. I proved to have numerous complications. I wasn’t 101 per cent during the show and that didn’t help matters.”

Turning to more recent work, Lloyd Webber animatedly discusses his next project, which he estimates will hit the stage in 2014.

“It’s the story of Stephen Ward and it’s got so many resonances to the world today.”

Ward was an osteopath and artist who became notorious after introducing the married British cabinet minister and MP John Profumo to a showgirl in 1961. Profumo became involved with the 19-year-old topless dancer Christine Keeler, while her friend, Mandy Rice-Davies, became involved with other politicians. The resulting scandal brought down the Macmillan government and led to Ward’s death.

“It’s a tale that should be told, about how a whole series of events could cause the establishment to close ranks to such an extent that they had to find somebody to use as a scapegoat,” Lloyd Webber says.

“It’s the story of a man they convicted because they needed a scapegoat for something that had gotten out of hand. Ward later took his own life on the basis of the judge’s summing up at his trial.

“How could it be that a man who was the most sought-after guest in England ended up as a waxwork in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds?”

He shakes his head.

“And a pair of young girls in the midst of all this.” Almost as if on cue, some of the potential Dorothys rush across the patio to the tropical beach, laughing happily. Lloyd Webber looks after them sadly.

“You’re talking about girls that age bringing down a government.”

ALW’s five favourite shows

The Phantom of the Opera

“After the first preview, Hal Prince said to me, ‘Shall we go on holiday until the opening?’ We never changed one note from then on.”

Cats

“We weren’t ever really sure if the first moment when the audience saw the first cat wasn’t going to be risible.”

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

“We wrote it as a simple school show, but it works in many ways, large and small. A good story. The Bible is full of them.”

Evita

“I thank Hal Prince for that one. He got it. He knew what it should say, how it should look, how it should move. He made it work.”

Sunset Boulevard

“It’s had a rough run, but I love a lot of the material and I’m joining up with my partners from it, Christopher Hampton and Don Black, on my next show.”

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